The Silent Tide (38 page)

‘It’s strange, though,’ Emily said. ‘You’d think that someone would have something.’

‘Don’t let’s worry about that now,’ Joel said softly.

She found herself looking into his eyes, which were warm and passionate . Gently he took her wine glass, then leaned in and kissed her mouth. She closed her eyes, and as they kissed more deeply, all her doubts went tumbling.

Isabel

It was March, though Isabel hardly cared. After lunch, she stood at the nursery window watching the trees sway in the wind. The garden was patched with spring flowers, gold, indigo and white. In the field beyond the fence the donkeys stood resolute, facing into the breeze. Behind her, after much grizzling, the baby had fallen asleep, and this meant for Isabel a brief respite from the grim exhaustion of looking after her, the constant pretence. She turned from the window and stooped to gather up a discarded garment. The movement was enough to cause little Lorna to stir, and Isabel froze, anxiously waiting, until the child sank deeper into sleep.

She was two months old now, Lorna. Her head was a normal shape, the black hair had fallen out and a blonde fluff had replaced it. Her body, too, was smooth and hairless, and though plumper, she remained pale, long and wiry. The navy eyes had lightened to forget-me-not blue.

‘She’s a Morton in every respect,’ Hugh’s mother would say proudly, cradling her granddaughter, and Isabel could not disagree. She was surprised to see how Mrs Morton’s expression softened as she gazed at the baby and wished she too could summon that warmth. But when she looked at Lorna, the lump she felt in her throat was not motherly tenderness but a deep sadness.

She tried her best. She spoke lovingly to the child, she returned Lorna’s rapturous smiles. She was always gentle with her, but increasingly, the sadness she felt was so heavy that everything was too much effort and her movements were clumsy. When Lorna woke crying from her nap, sometimes Isabel’s feet rooted to the spot, and it would be a moment before she could force herself to go to her. She’d read in a Maisie Briggs novel once of a mother consumed with longing to see her child asleep in the next room, and wondered why she never felt that about Lorna. She still dared not speak of it to anyone, especially the young doctor, who was a bachelor, for fear of being seen as unnatural, a monster. Perhaps they’d take Lorna away, and she didn’t want that either.

A monster. Twice, maybe three times, there had been moments that frightened her most of all, when despair turned to rage at the baby. Once, exhausted, she snatched up the crying child, intending to shake her, but some inner voice stayed her. No, that had terrified her.

At least now all was peaceful. She slipped past the sleeping Lorna and out of the room, towards the stairs. A sound made her glance back down the landing, where she saw something odd. The door at the far end, the door to the box room, was open, and it creaked as it moved in some draught. And through the doorway could be seen the back view of Hugh’s mother, shutting and locking the door of the inner room, the room that Isabel had never seen.

Isabel ducked into the open doorway of her bedroom and peered round, only drawing back when Hugh’s mother came out of the box room. She heard the woman go into her room, then the sound of a drawer opening and closing within, before she emerged once more. Isabel heard her wheezing breath as she walked past Isabel’s hiding place and made her way downstairs. Isabel waited a moment or two before closing her bedroom door. Then she lay on the bed for some time, thinking. Her curiosity about the little room was piqued, and this time she knew where to look for the key.

She did not have long to wait for an opportunity to present itself. Hugh was away, and the following day, Hugh’s mother announced that she was going out to visit some friends. A taxi duly arrived mid-afternoon and bore her away. Lorna was asleep and Isabel finished helping young Lily Catchpole hang up a load of baby washing on the line. Lily was always cheerful and a tireless worker. Quite how they’d all have managed without her, as Hugh’s mother was wont to say with a meaningful look at Isabel, nobody knew. The job done, it was easy for Isabel to gather up a pile of ironed sheets for the airing cupboard as an excuse to steal away upstairs.

Since Hugh’s mother had recovered from her illness of the previous summer, Isabel rarely entered her room. All was familiar: the chilly pale blue of the walls and hangings, the room so orderly, the old silk bedspread so perfectly draped that it was difficult to imagine that anyone slept there. A window had been left open and she shivered in the cold air. If ever a room reflected the personality of its owner it was this one, she thought as she glanced round, rubbing her arms for comfort as much as warmth.

Despite Lavinia Morton’s pious sentiments about her dead husband, there was no sign here that he had ever existed. Both wardrobes, when she peeped in, contained only the widow’s clothes. On a lace mat on the dressing-table were arranged two silver-backed brushes and a matching hand mirror, but no photographs. There was only one on the mahogany chest of drawers, but that was of Hugh in RAF uniform.

She looked about, nervous with guilt, wondering in which drawer the key might be kept. The dressing table first. Two deep drawers, one either side of the mirror, contained her mother-in-law’s vast collection of asthma remedies and other medicine. There was no sign of a key. The small top drawers of the mahogany chest contained gloves and jewellery cases, neatly stacked. She slipped her fingers down to explore the base, but could feel only the bottom of the drawer. A couple of the bigger drawers she tried were full of clothes of an intimate nature and she closed them quickly, starting to lose her courage. She was about to abandon her quest when she saw something she’d missed. Set under the bevelled top of the dressing table was an extremely shallow drawer, of the sort that had no handles. She gripped its underlip and pulled. It moved with a low squeaking noise, exactly the sound she’d heard the day before.

Within was a tray divided into compartments. In some were strands of costume beads, coiled like sleeping snakes, others held items of make-up, hairpins or similar. And in one long narrow compartment at the front was a large key. Her fingers closed over it. It was heavy and cold, but as she held it, it warmed quickly in her hand. She pushed the drawer shut with a strange feeling of excitement.

The box room itself was not kept locked so she let herself in and closed the door behind her. The door to the hidden room stood before her. The key turned easily enough. The door opened inward. With a terrible feeling of trepidation she pushed it, heard a sigh as it scraped over carpet.

Up until that moment she hadn’t really thought about what might be inside. She didn’t think it could be anything really horrible, but maybe something valuable that couldn’t be left about, unguarded. Or a secret store of something that one might have got in trouble for having during the war – black-market goods, perhaps. But there was nothing like that. The room was dark inside, a curtain drawn across the little window, and there was a smell of musty cloth mixed with a faint fragrance of flowers. It was empty but for cupboards, a large chest under the window, and an upright chair with arms. She stood for a moment feeling the ambience. Perhaps it had been the sigh of the door over the rug that made her think of whispering voices.

She stepped forward and unlatched the nearest cupboard. Immediately the door burst open and something rustling billowed out. Cloth, light and lacy, floated wide. The cupboard was full of dresses, gorgeous dancing dresses, she saw, reaching for the hangers and bringing them out one by one. Tulle and silk, satin and organza, all redolent of waltzes and orchestras and handsome young men in elegant suits. And again that flowery fragrance – the simple scent that might be worn by a young girl to her first ball. She opened another cupboard. Clothes again, but this time more exotic: fancy-dress costumes. A Spanish flamenco dress in cobalt blue; a long straight garment made up of strips of colour like a rainbow, with a netting cape stitched with pearl-beads shaped like raindrops; a long low-waisted dress with a girdle like a lady’s on a mediaeval tapestry. She pulled them out one by one, poring over the beauty of them, the exquisite embroidery of one, the thousands of sequins on what looked like a mermaid’s tail on another. They were gorgeous. Greedy now, she opened more cupboards of more clothes, then her eye fell on the trunk beneath the window. She loosed the catch and opened the lid.

Inside were more secrets: a pile of letters tied in red ribbon addressed to a Miss L. Osbourne – her mother-in-law’s maiden name, Lavinia Osbourne. She peeped at one. It was signed
All my love, Arthur.
Photographs in frames of a shy young woman with large doe-like eyes, not classically beautiful, but with all the loveliness and hope of youth. Could Hugh’s mother really ever have looked like that, so tender, so radiant? There were pictures of the young man, too, boyish with a light-coloured moustache. In one he wore the uniform of an Army officer. Underneath these, at the bottom of the trunk, Isabel found a shoebox, and its contents told the rest of the story. Another collection of letters, this time black-edged. A pressed flower, the photograph of a plain wooden cross stuck in a heap of earth amidst other such crosses. Its poignancy struck Isabel with such force that she clamped her hand over her mouth to prevent herself crying out.

This, then, was her mother-in-law’s secret: that she’d been young once and happy, had loved and been loved, and she’d lost. Here, perhaps in this chair that Isabel sank into, was where Lavinia Morton, née Osbourne, would sit and remember the past. Isabel wondered about Arthur, who’d been killed in the Great War, but something stopped her reading the letters. And now coming out of her reverie, she felt deeply ashamed of herself, being here, intruding. What right did she have to pry into an older woman’s girlhood secrets?

Quickly but carefully she replaced everything in the trunk, then set about tidying the clothes into the cupboards. Finished, she made sure everything was as before, except . . . She tucked a scrap of indigo velvet back into its cupboard, then backed out of the room, closing the door.

At once the baby’s cry came to her ears, and when she let herself out of the box room, she met Mrs Catchpole carrying a screaming Lorna.

‘Oh, there you are,’ Mrs Catchpole said, worried. ‘I can’t quiet her. She’s been crying and crying.’ She thrust Lorna into Isabel’s arms. Lorna’s crying stopped abruptly and she snuffled into Isabel’s shoulder.

‘What are you doing, anyway?’ Mrs Catchpole asked, seeing the key in her hand. ‘The mistress wouldn’t like you going in there.’

‘You won’t tell her?’ Isabel asked anxiously, but Mrs Catchpole pressed her lips together in a firm line. ‘Mrs Catchpole,’ Isabel said, ‘please. I – I didn’t mean any harm.’

The woman looked her straight in the eye. ‘You may not mean any harm,’ she said softly, ‘but nothing’s been the same in this house since you came into it. You need to pull yourself together, Miss, if you ask me. Now let me get on, will you?’ And she swept away downstairs.

Shocked and shaken, Isabel, still carrying Lorna, entered Hugh’s mother’s bedroom and replaced the key in its hiding place. The drawer creaked shut, but not quite flush, she saw with irritation. However, it wasn’t possible to correct it without putting Lorna down, so she gave it up as a bad job.

Much later, in bed as she prepared herself for sleep, she mulled over the secrets of the inner box room. She wondered if Hugh knew about the young soldier who had died, and speculated about the circumstances of his mother meeting his father, a London barrister, soon after the war, when many women who’d lost fiancés had no chance of finding another. Had her mother -in-law truly loved her husband, or had he simply filled a gap? She didn’t feel she could ask him: ‘Did your mother love your father?’ And how could she frame it anyway without drawing suspicion as to why she thought to ask it? But she was haunted now by the young Lavinia Osbourne, her parties and balls, the true love she had lost. There seemed no connection between this girl and the hard-faced, correct woman who presided over this house that Isabel could not bring herself to call home. No, young Lavinia Osbourne was no more, a memory to be taken out and looked at and regretted. How tragic, Isabel thought, how absolutely tragic, to lose all one’s hopes and dreams in a second’s blast of a shell or the thrust of a bayonet blade.

For most of the previous six weeks, very soon after the baby’s birth, in fact, Jacqueline had been gone, back to London to live with her husband, who had returned from Korea, for the time being at least. At first she had travelled back and forth to Suffolk, because Hugh had begged her to help. Isabel, in the early days after being discharged from hospital, was aware of hushed conversations and anxious looks about her health and whether she was managing, but she couldn’t care if Jacqueline was there or not. The other woman was helpful in practical ways, but Isabel could sense her sympathy running out to be replaced first by puzzlement at Isabel’s behaviour, then downright frustration.

‘Do try to make an effort,’ she burst out one day when Isabel wouldn’t leave her bed to rescue the crying baby, and although Isabel’s response to this was to force herself to get up, she threw Jacqueline such a mutinous look as she passed that the other woman seized her arm and said, ‘What is the matter with you?’ But Isabel threw her off and went to the nursery. Jacqueline didn’t visit for a week after that , until Hugh persuaded her to come back.

The evening after the incident with the box room, Hugh returned from two nights in London to say he’d been to dinner with Jacqueline and her husband. ‘Poor Jacqueline ,’ he told Isabel, as he poured himself a whisky, ‘Michael’s going out there again any day now. She’s dreadfully cut up . I said she should come and stay for a while. I expect you would like the company.’

‘I don’t need any company,’ she told him. She was sitting on the sofa where she’d been trying to read a book, but somehow these days she couldn’t take any of it in. She’d get to the bottom of a page and realise she’d have to start all over again.